social media

I visited Glemmen upper secondary school on Friday to help the three groups who are part of the Holberg Prize school projects. They seem to get along quite well on their own though. They now have one week left to complete their research projects. They have conducted a quantitative survey (with 300 respondents), several qualitative group- and individual interviews and an experiment in real-life settings.

I'd like to share some of the experiences of the group who are exploring youth and media-dependency. In order to explore their research theme, they lived without mass and personal media for two weeks: no music, no TV, no radio, no papers or magazines, no cell-phone, IM or no Internet. They were allowed to use the computer for school-work only and, yes, they were allowed to read books. I wasn't too surprised to learn that they seriously missed music and personal media. The interesting thing concerns how media use generally is very social. One of the girls said she hardly saw her friends, as she couldn't join them when they were watching movies or TV together. All of them said their friends were annoyed by the project, as they were no longer available from a distance. In fact, their friends were more annoyed than they were themselves. Living without media further meant being more bored, reading far more books, and physically moving around a lot more.